Olga Korbut

Olga Valentinovna Korbut (born 16 May 1955) is a Belarusian former gymnast. Nicknamed the "Sparrow from Minsk", she won four gold medals and two silver medals at the Summer Olympic Games, in which she competed in 1972 and 1976 for the Soviet team, and was the inaugural inductee to the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame in 1988. While Korbut retired from gymnastics in 1977 at the age of 22, which was considered young for gymnasts of the period, Korbut's influence and legacy in gymnastics was far reaching. Korbut's 1972 Olympic performances are widely credited as redefining gymnastics, changing the sport from emphasising ballet and elegance to acrobatics and technique, as well as changing popular opinion of gymnastics as a niche sport to one of the most popular sports in the world. 2Early life Korbut was born in Grodno. Her parents – Valentin and Valentina Korbut – after the WW2 moved to Grodno from Dubniaki (small town near Kalinkavichy). She started training at age 8, and entered a Belarusian sports school headed by coach Renald Knysh at age 9. There, Korbut's first trainer was Elena Volchetskaya, an Olympic gold medalist (1964), but she was moved to Knysh's group a year later. Initially he found her "lazy and capricious" but he also saw potential in her great talent, unusually supple spine, and charisma. With him, she learned a difficult backward somersault on the balance bea